Six-Seven: Ambivalence in the land of confusion
Figure 1: "The duty of youth is to challenge corruption." – Kurt Cobain
What is "post-truth" and our current condition of epistemic crisis? Does anyone value truth any more? How do young people say to teachers and authority figures, in the politest possible way of course, "I don't believe a single insincere word that passes your lips, and you long ago forfeited the right to even speak to me authoritatively"? It seems youth always find expression much better than we adults.
Let's start with an example of how us 'grown-ups' are getting ourselves confused. Understanding the news gets harder every day. This morning MSM reports:
President Trump's closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May - which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free - has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe.
It continues that this is "now Europe's problem" (emphasis mine).
Who is the problem of cheap goods a problem for?
Aren't all of us in Europe delighted and cheering now all those amazing Chinese products the Americans don't want are ours! How exactly are cheap goods a problem? Goods are like "good", right? Isn't this the capitalist technological paradise we worked towards for 100 years (and are still working toward even as the planet burns)? Yet it reads like the Chinese are dropping bombs, not prices.
Confusion is rife because duality of interpretation is woven into almost all media output nowadays, you don't have to look hard. At a recent cybersecurity conference I tripped up some colleagues with a simple observation: The cost of cybercrime is variously given as about a trillion dollars. That same figure is used to describe the industry as being worth a trillion dollars.
So is it a cost, or a value? Seems we have about a two trillion margin of error here? Obviously there are some people who suffer loss because of cybercrime and some who make a living fighting it. How easily we confuse loss with gain when all we can think about is money. But it's not just money that dissolves truth. Power is just as corrosive.
For your security. Really?
In the late 90s outside a railway station I remember laughing at two signs relating to CCTV cameras. The first said, in comforting, soft sans-serif;
Relax. Area covered by CCTV. For your protection and safety.
How lovely. A warm fuzzy feeling of benevolent guardianship flushed through my being. But wait a minute… across the street I could see another notice, an angry red-bordered sign looking scornfully down, proclaiming in BLOCK CAPITALS;
WARNING: CCTV… blah blah PROSECUTION… blah blah ZERO TOLERANCE…
Eeeew! Now hold on. I'm confused. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee seem to have got their messages mixed. Are they playing at "good cop, bad cop"? What gives?
As we have written in these pages many times, there are absolutely different kinds of "security".
- Security for you
- Security from (against) you
Making sure that you're thoroughly confused about which is which, is a serious business for some.
The second kind is obviously harder to sell to the people who are its targets. Marketing and public-relations messaging around this is sophisticated and slippery.
In digital technology, Microsoft are undisputed masters of getting people to pay for their own bars and chains, artfully muddying the waters around "security" as a bare noun. Stripping security of context adds ambiguity and allows abuse to be sold as security. Their products are indeed secure, for Netflix, for the music and film companies whose main threat is their own customers. Not so much for you end users.
Looking at this example a little deeper, locked-down software and even computing hardware is being aggressively pushed at gamers, branded as "anti-cheat", or "secure boot". Now, everyone hates cheats, except when they are one - and "AI" makes it ever harder to avoid being one.
The point is, it's not there to stop other people cheating. The digital locks are to stop you, the owner of the game and the computer, from cheating. Other people - other much smarter and motivated people - will still cheat. Meanwhile you bought into a digital gulag.
Like so many similar technologies, they punish the people who were never going to misbehave anyway.
None of this is new though. Ambivalence in the face of shrugging ambiguity has been building in society for decades. For fifty years oil companies looked at terrifying climate science and said, "We're not really sure what the data means". Really? Tobacco companies paid doctors to say "Maybe smoking is good for you".
Six. Seven. Six. Seven. Did it really matter whether there were any "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq? Or which country was behind the 9/11 attacks? C'mon y'all, why the serious face? Why do journalists get so hung-up on "facts". In Humpty Dumpty's world the truth is whatever I say it is.
Putin's psyops mastermind Vladislav Surkov knew well the power of sowing ambivalence. In turn, Trump learned too, that to pick a side is to pick a loser. To espouse any solid values is to miss out on half the votes. It is basic Machiavellian craft to give visible support to both sides. To blow hot and cold. Eastasia, Oceania, Eurasia, as long as we own the narrative who cares?
Where does this leave a young generation who are looking for moral values, for role models, for certainty and those who have the "courage of their convictions"? As George Carlin pointed out, kids can never take any adult seriously who insists they "Question authority!" Turns out critical thinking can't be "taught" that way. Authority requires care and sincerity, not mere correctness and power.
Historian Rutger Bregman may well call for moral revolution (a talk that seems much inspired by Jacqueline Novogratz). But it's not going to be led by adults and teachers who can't get basic values straight.
What do the numbers say?
Now, I've been trying to understand something else quite puzzling about the psychology of a younger generation regarding maths.
Mathematics is beautiful. It is a pure joy, not just to minds that excel at it but to anyone with the least interest in the universe.
What is one hundered and sixty six divided by ninety nine?
For most of my life I've always been able to get that feeling across, to engage curiosity and love for nature's fundamental mystery.
Somehow us educators manage to take a giant crap all over it. We turn maths into questions about compound interest and the trajectory of artillery shells. Maybe I've just become a tired old and bad maths teacher, but I see something else at play…
Kids increasingly see the "Boomer" generation as clownish. We are idiots. We wrecked the planet. We squabble like infants. We are loud and "booming" on subjects like "The Economy" (as if we knew anything about that really). Like cocksure "AI" programs we confidently strut out numbers - ten percent this, ninety five percent that. Numbers are facts. Numbers are the trousers of reality 1. Yet when it comes to answering simple but serious questions we are suddenly as quiet as mice.
We hide behind numbers. They are no longer a light to the world, but a cloak to wrap ourselves in.
Six. Seven. Six. Seven. It's the new "Whatever!". It's a fresh "Chinny Reckon", a massive Jimmy Hill scratch aimed at those who claim authority but are laughably full of lies and obviously batting for the enemy.
It's an expression of ambivalence around numerical 'reality'. It pokes at the implied need for precision and judgements so stridently resting on a number. It's humour that eases the pain, cognitive dissonance, mixed feelings, indecisiveness and uncertainty around numerality.
NURSE: How much of this very powerful drug should I administer to the patient?
DOCTOR: Six? Seven?
A not so unexpected side effect of technologies like algorithmic feeds, Tik Tok and "AI", is that they surface unconscious elements of culture.
For media pundits hoping to "explain" Six-Seven, the apparent origin in basketball video memes, its interpretation as a "meaningless" mass craze are correct but unimportant. Certainly, like all crazes it's driven by fun, peer expression bringing a sense of belonging.
Yet these observations say nothing about what it might mean. It may be "nonsense" but that doesn't imply it's "meaningless". Indeed, we may ironically be more correct than we realise if we recognise "nonsense!" as the message. In Wittgenstein's sense that "words stand-in for things" Six-Seven is calling-out our nonsense. It is a mocking accusation of the nonsense we all speak when we presume to use numbers as a stand-in for authority.
As a teacher of mathematics, increasingly to younger people whose schools fail them, I sense that they don't feel any "ownership" of numbers. Strange as it may sound, I think kids increasingly feel, as measured, quantified, depersonalised objects, that numerality is the preserve of bullshitters - in Frankfurt's sense, people who have contempt for truth except insomuch as it serves their immediate ambition - and those who seek control.
Visibly, Six-Seven is much more about the hand gestures and facial expressions that go along with it - a slightly monkey-faced lower lip that says; "Whatever!", "WTF?", or as comedienne Catherine Tate puts it nearly twenty years ago, "Am I bothered?". It is playing the idiot in the face of idiocy. Kids are mirroring nervous, indecisive, flip-flopping and post-modern ineffectuality. It is the same expression on Mr. Trump's face when he calls himself a stable genius and Mr. Putin a good friend. One hundred percent confident, performative fakery.
This monkey's gone to heaven
Six? Seven? Does it really matter what I say? Who cares?
Psychologists and political scientists I speak to seem to be in accord on one thing now; that there is a massive crisis of leadership in the air. It is global. Wherever you go there are "no longer any adults in the room". Not rational adults. Bullies, sure. Shit stirrers and fear mongers absolutely. Grinning fakers and frauds, take your pick!
If we are plunging into an interregnum, if truth is the first casualty of war, and if Blaise Metreweli is right that we're in the twilight between peace and war, then that's partly our own doing and within our power to pull back from the brink. Epistemic mistrust is a psyops weapon, and we must look both abroad and closer to home for those that are full of bullshit and peddle the tools of bullshit, because they, in their own weak minds have given up on the truth. In the funniest ways their own kids are calling them out on it.
Footnotes:
Actually an awesome, entertaining and inspiring book "The Trousers Of Reality: Why Things Like Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking and Theory Of Constraints Are Essential For Effective Project Management" (2009) Barry Evans, Code Green Publishing.